Asymmetric lepton-flavor violating Higgs decays

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel data-driven method to search for lepton-flavor violating Higgs decays to tau and electron/muon, estimating backgrounds directly from data, and assesses LHC sensitivity with current data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new asymmetry-based, data-driven approach to detect lepton-flavor violating Higgs decays in leptonic tau channels, improving sensitivity analysis.

Findings

Expected 3σ sensitivity for branching ratios around 0.9% with 20 fb⁻¹ at 8 TeV.

Method exploits electron-muon asymmetry to distinguish signal from background.

Detailed discussion of statistical treatment and method validation.

Abstract

We introduce a new method to search for the lepton-flavor violating Higgs decays $h\rightarrow\tau\mu$ and $h\rightarrow\tau e$ in the leptonic $\tau$ decay channel. In particular, the Standard Model background is estimated in a fully data driven way. The method exploits the asymmetry between electrons and muons in the final state of signal events and is sensitive to differences in the rates of the two decays. Using this method, we investigate the LHC sensitivity to these processes. With 20 ${\rm fb}^{-1}$ of data at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV, we expect a $3\sigma$ sensitivity for observing branching ratios of order $0.9\%$. The method and the suggested statistical treatment are discussed in detail.